Hey readers,

A truly global edition this week, with stories from Lebanon, Brazil and France.

Banana growers, take note: Trichoderma delivers against Fusarium wilt with the right variety. In Brazil, a fungus that kills rice's worst pest is moving into field validation. France is backing tomato protection with a whole toolkit of biological tools at once. And a little-known bacteria makes its commercial debut, with real promise against soil-borne pathogens.

Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 is the problem the banana industry still has no chemical answer for. The fungus behind it, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense TR4, enters through the roots, clogs the plant's vascular system, and leaves chlamydospores that survive in the soil for decades. It has already reached more than twenty countries, including Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.

A study published in April in the Egyptian Journal of Biological Pest Control asked a plain question: what can living biocontrol agents do against it in the field, not the Petri dish. Researchers at the American University of Beirut, after finding TR4 in 30 percent of the 87 banana fields they surveyed in southern Lebanon, screened seven Trichoderma harzianum strains, took the two best, T24 and T42, and tested them from the greenhouse through to a naturally infested commercial orchard of 768 plants, across several banana varieties.

The Trichoderma held the disease down from the greenhouse to the field. How much it paid off, though, depended on the variety as much as on the treatment. When they paired T24 with T42, the biggest percentage gain came in the susceptible Canarian, where yield rose 198 percent, but that reflects how little it produced untreated to begin with. The tolerant GCTCV-218 rose a steadier 79 percent and produced more in absolute terms.

The authors are clear about the limit: the pathogen stays in the soil and cannot be eradicated, and the most durable control came from combining the biocontrol with a variety that already resists the disease.

For a grower facing a disease with no chemical fix, Trichoderma is not something to spray on and forget. It works as one piece of an integrated program, matched to a variety that can already hold the line, and that is where the yield is won.

A biological control for the worst pest of irrigated rice is moving into field validation in Santa Catarina, the last stretch before it could become the state's first such product. Through the 2025/26 harvest, researchers at Epagri's Itajaí station are testing a Beauveria fungus that kills the grain stink bug on a working rice farm.

It started with a chance observation, when entomologist Eduardo Hickel saw the insects dying wrapped in a fungus during the cold off-season months. The team went on to identify and multiply the Beauveria and confirm in the lab that it holds up alongside the chemicals growers use at grain filling, since the aim is integrated control, chemical and biological together.

The appeal is clear: fewer insecticide passes mean lower costs, less contamination of soil, water and workers, and a cleaner grain for demanding markets. The rice processor Urbano Alimentos and three grower cooperatives are backing the work, the São Paulo company Ballagro is set to develop the commercial product, and a 2026 phase will test infecting stink bugs in the lab and releasing them to spread the fungus through the crop.

Santa Catarina grows irrigated rice on 145,000 hectares, and the same pest runs across the far larger fields of Rio Grande do Sul and the rest of the Mercosur rice belt, so a living control that works here could spread across the region.

France has backed a tomato crop protection program built on a group of biological technologies rather than a single active ingredient. BIOSPHÆRE, a consortium of Gene&GreenTK, Lipofabrik (Éléphant Vert Group), the INRAE Avignon plant pathology unit and the testing laboratory Enigma, will spend €3 million from January 2026 to December 2028 under the France 2030 i-Demo program, half of it public funding.

The target is the tomato, and the plan is to defend it on several fronts at once. The program lines up four biological tools against the crop's insect pests and its bacterial and fungal diseases: antimicrobial enzymes, biocontrol lipopeptides, biocontrol microorganisms and natural antifungal substances. INRAE Avignon handles the scientific evaluation and Enigma the trials.

For now it is a funded pipeline, one backing biological combinations rather than a single product, on the idea that the right mix can cover ground where a single product often cannot.

Paenibacillus ottowii has almost no track record in biocontrol, which is what makes its debut worth a look. It is the active behind Eficaz Control, a biofungicide from Embrapa Milho e Sorgo and the company Simbiose, paired in the formulation with a strain of Bacillus velezensis, a species already known for the same job.

Both strains come from the Cerrado, collected in Sete Lagoas, Minas Gerais, and both earned their place the slow way: more than nine years of work and a screen of 190 microorganisms drawn from maize stigmas and sorghum seeds, begun in 2016, according to Embrapa researcher Christiane Abreu de Oliveira Paiva. What they suppress is the soil-borne complex behind root and stalk rot: Fusarium spp., Macrophomina phaseolina and Colletotrichum graminicola. Embrapa reports control of up to 80 percent of these pathogens in the field, along with yield gains, and Eficaz Control is already registered for maize and soybean against Fusarium.

The two-strain design is deliberate: combining bacteria with different modes of action spreads the pressure on the pathogen. The fact that a bacteria with no commercial history reached the market on the strength of a nine-year screen is a reminder that the next useful strain may already be sitting in a collection, waiting for someone to test it properly.